TheHighWay

Yank thou mery vuch The gurdawad's the gillawad! Holy cow... I can't believe I forgot about this... he was hilarious when he really got going... anyone know where he picked up this form of pig-latin? I must admit he could be very inspiring when he was just being himself in some after-meeting with the corps. When he wasn't trying to impress everyone... Unfortunately, those few moments were so completely overtaken by the multitudes of times he was a self-important, angry, pompous a$$, I actually had to think awhile before I even remembered them.

Here's a whole series of links regarding what will or will-not happen to Kenyon Hall: http://www.emporiagazette.com/search/?sort...te&q=kenyon Holy crud, someone was selling the Kenyon doors on eBay: http://cgi.ebay.com/BEAUTIFUL-ANTIQUE-GLAS...2QQcmdZViewItem

Oh man, on one post she writes: "Now, the Way does not tell us to believe everything they teach blindly. They tell us to go work the scriptures ourselves, delve into the Hebrew and Greek ourselves, and that is what we do! Don't you think that if we found tons of errors and private interpretation in the Way's teachings that we wouldn't be involved in the first place?" And a little while later she writes: "I'm still a little unclear on tithing too, once I have a steady income I would like to abundantly share on a regular basis, but not until I understand it fully." "... no of course I do not KNOW Greek and Hebrew... My Professor thought I was 'fluent' in Greek during an "Understanding the Bible" lecture because I did know so many biblically important Greek words - thanks to all that I have learned through the ministry." TRANSLATION -- I accept everything twi tells me as gospel truth. I memorize the words they tell me are important and I spout them back out in order to sound intelligent. The fact I have not researched them myself, nor do I really understand the deeper meanings of most of them is unimportant. If twi tells me it is a greek word, and I can find it in a concordance, then Twi is right. Everyone else is just mis-informed or willfully ignorant. Drink the koolaid!!!!!!

Here's my favorite part of her whole diatribe: "If we wanted a debate we could go talk to any person in the world who perceives God's Word to be foolish, or just talk to people of other denominations. This is NOT profitable. I love a good biblical discussion - we all do. But this is not the place for it..." Holy Crap!!! and pass the Koolaid please.

I have been many times, in several different cities... they are all slightly different, but all silly and outrageous and rowdy and fun. I started going in college. It seems like a rite of passage for so many kids these days, and I just recently found out they actually have midnight showings even in my not-so-big city... maybe I'll just drop in and see what new lines they've come up with... so near to Halloween would probably be extra-special fun. Wonder if they'll let an old duffer like me in the door? I'm sure you've been warned that the subject matter is on the wild side, but not nearly as shocking today as it must have been to mainstream audiences in the 70s (*laughs devilishly* If you really want to be prepared, you can find sites on the internet that not only have the song lyrics but the dialog and the most commonly-used audience lines. fyi --- Meatloaf (who was working on his Bat Out of Hell album when he shot Rocky Horror) will be performing live on this morning's Today Show. *********** Be sure to tell us about your experience!!!!!

My memories of the Horneys are varied... Jacque was fun and outrageous our first year in-rez, Ed was stiff as a board but you could tell he really felt priviledged to be a corps coordinator and was trying to teach/train us well. They told funny stories on themselves, and threw spontaneous parties for us... oh, and they taught us the Bullwinkle cheer. I liked and respected them. However, by our second in-rez year, well, you could tell the pressure of being RIGHT all the time was getting to them... a lot of the sponteneity and the smiles were gone. There was an edge to them I hadn't seen before. Reminds me VERY much of the process I saw Rico Magnelli and his wife go through. There is only so much time you can put in as top leadership before you change. I posted something I ran across about Jacque being on a writing forum some time ago because I thought they were still at HQ and I was surprised she was being allowed to do "real" work. At this point, I'm happy for anyone who finds any kind of success outside the realm of twi... maybe, just maybe, it will help them see their way out of the cult.

My son went through a twi dedication... since we were corps, skipping it wasn't even a consideration. Still, in the back of my brain I thought it was much ado about nothing. The ceremony was nice but it didn't make me any more committed to raising my kid right. BUT, like so many things in twi, whatever the original intent, the effect was to make us all more afraid to walk away... we would be breaking our vow to raise our children in deVerd... would God visit our broken vows on our children?????? I'm so thankful I can now give big ol wet raspberries to all of it!!! I have a GREAT kid in spite of being a twi-head when he was little, not because of it. In answer to your question... I never saw leadership pressure anyone to have their kids dedicated. But then again, that's probably not something that was done openly and who knows what happened behind closed doors.

Yes, I believe Mary Poppins would have been kicked out of the Zero Corps, too...lol.

Geez, that does sorta look like him, doesn't it?

"Thesaurus Abuse" ----rotflmaopmp!!! I think you've coined a new phrase, Shortfuse. Thesaurus Abuse ==> the over-vocabularizing of a sentence by expressing every possible discriptor available so as to clarify your meaning, with the end result that your original point is lost among a string of adjectives and adverbs that make it sound as if you are reading straight from a thesaurus.

Ditto what everyone has said about physical abuse. Run, don't walk, to your nearest shelter and get help getting away from him, and get the authorities involved!!!! I know that is not an easy thing to do, but it is a NECESSARY thing to do... for yourself... for your kids. As for finding yourself post-twi, many great suggestions have been posted already. I was in for 19 years so in order to rediscover the REAL me, I took it all the way back to before I ever heard of the way... what music did I like? what hobbies did I have? who were my friends? how did I decorate my rooms? What did I want to be when I grew up? I was amazed to find out I was really very much that same old person inside, just with some new wisdom and insight. And the thing I found most helpful about reading the Bible was to allow myself t have emotions again. The one thing I had enjoyed so much about church as a child was the emotional lift it gave me... the inner insight and strength to be a better person and to face challenges. All the analyzing of every little jot and tittle in twi caused me to completely lose that childlike wonder and that special impact of the Bible. Don't be afraid to let God work through those emotions he gave you to help you understand His message to you. And use this forum... post early, post often... there is nothing on your mind too big or too small to post here. We've all seen it, we've all felt it, and many of us have posted it !!! Posting is like purging... it helps you to think it all through, gives you a voice when you had none before, and mostly it just gets it out of your head and out of your system. It can be a big, big help to anyone recovering from twi. Please take care of yourself and let us know how you are doing. **edited for typos

Thanks Shortfuse... good information!

What the heck are they doing there? And when did they leave?

QUOTE: "extremely unapproachable" Unfortunately, that is my recollection toward the end, as well. In the earlier days it was: if you were on the stage, we were all in it together. But when I got to HQ (mid-late 80s) most of the 'big names' (snort) would walk right past the rest of us without a word. We were just so many plants to make them look better. Even folks I had known in their humbler days acted like this. Ridiculous!!

Anyone know if this Ken McCaw on ZoomInfo is "our" Ken McCaw?

I agree with Hope... there were only a very few folks in Way Prod that were ever true musicians. Most of us were musical duffers (and yes, I was one of them... a precurser to the singing ladies... sorry) The interesting thing to me is that this was true from the beginning on. But we all loved the early music!! Why? Because it wasn't about perfection, or even musicality, it was about joy and genuine praise and the love of God and the desire to share your enthusiasm with others. All that heart smoothed over the rough spots. But once you take all that away, you are left with nothing but the mediocrity. The women's quartet I sang in was NOT great. It was okay. But it was fun and it was emotional, and people seemed to like it. We were genuine and that came through. One gal that was in that quartet is now in the Singing Ladies. It makes me cringe. She looks completely plastic now... forced smile, forced hand motions, forced footwork, BLAH!!!!!!! Someone mentioned the music contest. That event marks the turning point for me. There was a gal from Emporia who was a GREAT performer, but she'd had some run-ins with the leadership. And there were some groups from the field that had some really decent presentations but they didn't even get a sniff. They made a BIG deal about HOW a group should present themselves on stage, etc, etc. And who won? The HQ-hand-picked perfectly polished corps gal, of course. To me, this event marked the difference between trying to help folks with stage presence and trying to mold everyone into the same little way prod robot.

Dittos... it deserves to be said. There were some really good corps folks.

Another comment here: I didn't start to make my break from twi and an oppressive marriage until I got my own car (something I did without for an unbelievable number of years) and until I held down a full time job where I was told I was good at what I did, and given more and more responsibility. In other words, an OUTSIDE INFLUENCE over an EXTENDED period of time. Even with that, and a marriage that was putting me into a deep depression, it wasn't until a local leader suggested to my husband that if he didn't make some changes he might lose me (he actually meant that he would cause my death with his wrecklessness, not that I might divorce him because of his oppression) that I even considered the possibility of breaking up my marriage. In my mind, I needed a twi sanction to carry out a non-twi-sanctioned action. How warped is that??????? But it felt perfectly natural to me at the time. Dorothea had no such outside influence consistently building her up, and she was "in" twi for ???? exactly how many years to my twenty? Yes, she eventually had kids that left twi and I'm certain they would have been offering her sanctuary if she wanted it, but after so much time, I just don't think she would have known how to leave.

Dot ((((hug))))!!! Thank you for posting that. I can only hope it will make some folks stop and think. The mind-bending went deep. Deeper and deeper the higher up you climbed the leadership ladder. It was never as simple as, "Why didn't you just speak up or leave?" As I've given this more thought, I think you also must bring up the needs/wants of the victim. In an abusive family, it is the person's need to be loved and appreciated that gets used against them to prevent them from telling or leaving. In our case, it was our fervent desire to be a beloved child of God and love and serve others. This innocent desire got twisted back upon us and became the bars of our own cage. Again, I can completely understand Dotsie doing whatever she felt she had to do in the early years. My questions come from later in the timeline... when she saw others leave, when her own adult children left, when VP died, when she clearly hated LCM yet supported him publically... I can only imagine she had become so comfortable with reconciling the irreconcilable, believing her own set of defensive falsehoods, that she didn't have a clue how to walk away. THW

Twinot, I really don't think Mrs. W's position has anything to do with it (let's face it, in most cases the higher up the person, the more heat we give them for their mistakes). I think it is that many of us have been in abusive marriages and can really sympathize/empathize with her in a very personal way. To condemn her is, in a way, to condemn ourselves for not leaving bad situations for far too long.

Okay, here's my take on it: 1) Mrs. W was a victim. Like most of us were victims. 2) Mrs. W stayed a victim. She never found the inner strength or external support or whatever it would have taken for her to stop being a victim. And, as so often happens, when a victim doesn't speak out, the abuser moves on and abuses others. We can be angry about that and point our fingers and say, she should have been strong enough to keep me from being victimized. But she wasn't. She was weak. (or maybe she was strong in all the wrong ways, like supporting her husband no matter what) Whatever. She stayed a victim. 3) Donna started out as a victim, too, and frankly, so did Craig. But at some point, they turned the corner and became abusers, themselves. They perpetuated the cycle. That's what makes them different from Mrs. W. in my opinion. From everything I've read and experienced first-hand Mrs. W could be cranky, opinionated, and let fly with quite the cutting remark, but mostly she was kind-hearted and generous and thoughtful and sad. She never became one of the abusers. That's why so many of us can feel sorry for her, and forgiver her weaknesses. Like the difference between Harry Weirwille's wife and Howard Allen's wife. One stayed a victim, enabling others to be victimized. The other became an abuser in her own right. That, to me, is the fundamental difference. It is the difference between forgiving weakness, and forgiving intentional harm. -----------------------------------------------------------------

To me, it's another example of avoiding the extremes... certainly you shouldn't let your emotions run every decision over your logic. But we were taught to completely ignore every feeling we had (oh, but at the same time we thought we were getting so good at listening to that still, small voice!!). I watched my ex repeatedly shut down our young son's outpouring of one emotion or another (hurt, upset, angry, whatever) by telling him to control his mind NOW. Yet, this same man wondered why this same son never showed him any affection. Well, he!!s-be!!s, you can't have it both ways. Either emotions are okay or they aren't. The kid was just responding to what his dad was teaching.

Congratulations!!! Thanks for being willing to take on the fight for the sake of the kids.

Jardinero, "sex before marriage is okay" was definately taught publically In the early 90s (I don't remember the exact year but perhaps in the aftermath of the ROA being shut down) they made a point of teaching down the way tree (RCs taught LCs, LCs taught BCs, BCs taught FCs, and FCs taught the rest) that sex before marriage was NOT, repeat NOT a sin. That bed-hopping was NOT condemned in the new testament. BUT... they tied it in to "children obey your parents before the Lord" so that if mom and dad didn't want junior fooling around, junior would be in trouble with God (and the leadership) if he fooled around. And they tied it in to "most women can't have sex without becoming emotionally involved", so you have to be careful who you fool around with so you don't cause harm. And they tied it in to "don't be a stumbling block to your brother's faith" so that if your "freedom in Christ" was causing a fellow believer to have doubts you should rethink your activities. (Of course this ties back in to a person being "spiritually mature enough" to handle our freedom in Christ, which is what VP and the rest used to justify their damaging behaviors.) I distinctly remember these teachings because it caused no small stir in our area... it was not new information to me, but apparently it was new to a lot of the families who didn't appreciate it being taught to their teens without prior warning, and a couple of families felt it was such a wrong teaching they eventually left twi because of it.

Well, Skyrider, didn't they put together the Teen Stage at one point? (what years did they have that?) I never went over there, but heard from several kids that they liked it, a lot. But then, all of a sudden, lcm goes on a rant about the guys who were pushing the teen activities: Joe G and Kevin G, to be specific. They were great with the kids, and the kids loved them for it. More than once I heard lcm rant during a meal time to/about these two gentlemen. He said they had their priorities messed up. He said they were catering to the teens' worldly natures instead of bringing them to the Word. He said he didn't give a rip if the teens liked it or not, there would be no more teen stage. No more teen summer school. (if memory serves, this was BEFORE the whole ROA orgy rant happened... Radar, do you remember the timeline on this?) I never understood it, even at the time. I had worked a teen summer school with these guys and seen how they got the kids to enjoy the Bible and bond with each other and step up a bit to teach, etc... it was great. Next thing I know, lcm says "no more of that". It always seemed to me that lcm was jealous of the attention and appreciation these men were getting from the next generation of believers.